


The Lam

by Empatheia



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-12-26 09:29:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12056097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Empatheia/pseuds/Empatheia
Summary: Escape is its own misery.





	The Lam

**Author's Note:**

> 750words entry from earlier this year. Just a little poking around with a character I really enjoyed.

_ Why Nilt? _ she imagined people asking her. Who the imagined voice belonged to changed by the day, from patients to friends to rivals and back again, but always that same question.

Why Nilt?

Why this particular backwater lump, out of all the backwater lumps she could have chosen? Many of them were nicer.  _ Most _ of them were nicer. More temperate climates, more colour in the vegetation, more palatable cuisine, better amenities.

Admittedly, it wasn't the  _ worst _ option out there, but it fell well below the average when it came to livability.

That was why, she told the ghosts of her past. Nilt was far from the best, but it wasn't the worst, and that put it near the bottom of the list when it came to where anyone would be likely to start searching for her. The nicer planets made sense on one level, the worst on another, but Nilt was neither and did not set itself apart from anything.

The food was fine, in any case. She had no complaints. The cold was bitter, but over the years she'd acclimated somewhat and it no longer confined her to her little wilderness habitat the way it had in the beginning. She'd never be a Nilt native, never have their built-in resistance to it, but she had gone out in her shirtsleeves in the summertime a time or two and lasted nearly an hour.

That question satisfied, the ghosts always moved on to the same antecedent:  _ Do you miss Dras Annia? _

She did. Of course she did. It had been home for decades, and she had known most of the permanent residents. Day after day, she had practiced her chosen craft, feeling comfortably assured that the next day would bring more of the same. More patients to help, more visits from her friendlier acquaintances, trips for groceries and basic needs to the shops she knew the layouts of blindfolded. The false vistas in the unfashionable older corners, which she had so enjoyed. The stars from her own wallside window, which she had never programmed to show anything but the truth.

It had all felt so solid, back then. Dras Annia, the world as she knew it. It changed, of course, as all things did, but only at a sedate pace it was comfortable with. Reality hardly seemed to extend beyond it.

Then the gun, in its light-eating case. A weapon made for killing gods.

Suddenly, Dras Annia had seemed the distant fiction, and the void outside it the reality.

Leaving had seemed strangely easy, then, however unthinkable it had been hours earlier. Her life, as she knew it, was already shattered. Picking her careful way out of the scattered field of shards was only sensible. Breaking into a run once clear of it was the only course of action that made any sense.

So she had run, to the last place Anaander Mianaai would look for her, and left as little trace as she could manage. Five fares out of the system in her name, and her on none of them, huddled in the hold of a transport ship after having bribed its rather amoral captain. No ancillaries here, no artificial intelligence at the heart of the metal beast to watch her every move. Just an ordinary ship, nuts and bolts and easily evaded cameras.

In her heart of hearts, she hadn't really expected it to work. Every morning, when she awakened, she expected on some level to find an instance of the Lord of the Radch sitting at her kitchen table, drinking hot fermented milk and smiling to himself.

Every morning, even as the years passed and Dras Annia faded into a warm blur of undifferentiated memory, shunted aside to make room for the spheres of existence labelled "flight" and "hiding." Every night, before she went to bed, she wondered if she would wake up again the next day.

The expectation remained long after the fear, so that when one day she woke up to the trill of the perimeter alarms, she was on some level surprised. Not that it had happened, but by the strength of her reaction, the long-dormant terror flooding back through her arteries to electrocute her.

She had expected it to happen someday, but somehow not really expected it to happen on whatever day she was living through at the moment. No one could survive like that. It was her own body defending her against the crippling reality of a truly constant threat. As a doctor, she knew the mechanisms of it inside and out, and yet she had missed it happening to herself.

Her fingers fumbled the magnetic closures of her heavy-duty winter outerwear. Thankfully, they did not require precision; once she got them close enough to each other, they snapped together on their own. She was glad that her dulled fear had not prevented her from keeping an emergency pack by the door; slinging it over her shoulder, she fled into the late morning light.

This was another checkpoint, she knew. The end of one era and the beginning of the next. Her mind would package up all her memories from landing on Nilt for the first time until she had gone to sleep the night before, and start a new sphere for the era following this. Evasion, perhaps, if she was lucky. Torment, if she wasn't.

There was nothing out there in the snows. Nothing, at least, that cared for her, or meant her well. Ice worms, lying fat and vicious in their crevices under the fragile skin of ice. Moss spores waiting for the right conditions to proliferate. The various small creatures that called the tundra their home, who ate the moss and were eaten by the ice worms in turn. A whole ecosystem could hardly be called 'nothing,' and yet from her perspective it was close enough to make no difference.

Further north, Nilt was uninhabitable. Not just cold, but so far below the melting point of water that nothing could retain enough heat to be considered alive. There had been questions about some of the crystalline formations, early on in the settlement, according to the records, but those investigations had gone nowhere because the expense involved in getting equipment up there was not commensurate with the potential benefits. If there were crystal beings living in the bright caverns below the crust of the world there, it seemed unlikely that anyone but themselves would ever know.

She could not go north, away from civilization, even if she meant to run again.

This time, she didn't.

Back then, when she had fled from Dras Annia, she had been younger and had feared death much more than she did now. Death, then, had meant losing a life she cared about, a future she very much wanted to see and experience. She had fled because she wanted to live some more. On Nilt, however, all she had managed was survival. There was little here to live for.

So she would be careful, but she would not run.

Something would just have to end here.

**X**


End file.
